Asked, answered.

Yes. Copper Lane is me, Sean Inglis. You email me, you get me. No account handlers, no junior designers working under a senior designer's name, no sub-contracting it out. I have been building websites for around twelve years, and I run the studio full time from Ampleforth.

Because the work is real and it should be paid for honestly. Designing and building a proper site takes me two to four weeks of full attention. Studios that bundle that into a low monthly are lending you the build and recovering it over a long tie-in, which is why those deals come with twelve, twenty four or thirty six month contracts. I would rather charge £1,200 once, keep you on a three-month minimum, and let the monthly plan be what it actually says it is: the ongoing work of keeping your site fast, safe and found.

Yes. The studio is in Ampleforth and the local work is the focus, but I work remotely with clients anywhere in the UK and have done for twelve years. The local North Yorkshire angle on the site reflects where the studio is and where most clients are, not a restriction on who I work with.

Two numbers, and that is the lot. The design and build is a one-off £1,200. After launch it runs on a monthly plan: Growth at £129/month or Local Pro at £199/month. There is a three-month minimum on the plan, then it is month to month, and hosting, security and support are included throughout. Extras beyond a standard website, logos, ecommerce, booking systems, copywriting from scratch, are quoted separately and clearly before any work starts.

Growth at £129/month is the full system and it is the right choice for most businesses: active monthly local SEO, missed-call text-back, automatic review requests, two blog posts, Google Business Profile posts, rank tracking on ten keywords, and a plain monthly report. Local Pro at £199/month is the same work at double the pace: four blog posts, weekly profile posts, your top three local rivals tracked, a monthly Search Console review with fixes actioned, and a quarterly strategy call. Start on Growth. Move up when you have seen it working and want more of it.

Most small business websites take two to four weeks once I have your content and photos. A very simple site can be faster; a larger one with copywriting takes a little longer. If you are organised about getting content over, faster. If you take a month to send the photos, longer. I will tell you what I need and when, and keep you posted on progress each Friday.

The £1,200 build fee is split in half: £600 to book the work into the diary, £600 on the day your site goes live. Your monthly plan, Growth at £129 or Local Pro at £199, starts the day the site goes live, billed monthly by direct debit or card. There is a three-month minimum on the plan, then you are month to month and can cancel with 7 days notice. Invoiced from Copper Lane.

By design, no, and that is usually a feature, not a limitation. A site you cannot accidentally break is a site that stays looking good. Your monthly plan includes the edits, handled by me, which is typically simpler and faster than the owner doing it themselves. Send the change, it gets done.

Often, yes. About half my work is rebuilds. I review what you have, tell you honestly what is worth keeping, including any ranking history, and either refactor it or rebuild from scratch, on the same £1,200 build and monthly plan. If the existing site is in decent shape and the job is genuinely smaller, I will say so and quote less. The takeover review costs you nothing.

Yes. The £1,200 build fee buys the website outright, so the site you paid for is yours. Your domain, your content, your Google Business Profile and your other accounts are yours and stay in your name. The hosting and the connected tools, the review requests, the missed-call text-back and the lead follow-up, run on the Copper Lane platform, and those are an ongoing service rather than a file. If you ever cancel, I export the website and hand it over so you can host it elsewhere. You keep the site, the service is what stops.

Yes, and it is the main event. Every website launches with the local SEO foundations built in: page titles, schema, Google Business Profile alignment. The £129/month Growth plan then adds the active monthly work: GBP posts and review replies, local rank checks, steady citation building, small content improvements, and a plain-English monthly report. That ongoing work is what takes a site from 'launched' to 'ranking'.

The signals that matter for AI search overlap heavily with classic local SEO, a strong Google Business Profile, structured data on your site, factual content, citations across trusted directories. Businesses with proper local SEO foundations are showing up in AI answers; businesses without them aren't. The monthly work on the £129 Growth plan includes keeping an eye on AI-search visibility across the main platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Gemini) so you can see where you stand.

Included. Every plan covers hosting, SSL, daily backups, security updates, monitoring, and direct support after launch. Care is not a separate product you have to remember to buy, it is simply how a Copper Lane site works, because a website without it slowly gets slower, less secure, and more out of date until one Tuesday it stops working. One clear monthly figure, no surprise bills.

There is a three-month minimum, then the plan rolls month to month and you can cancel with 7 days notice. The website is yours, bought outright with the build fee, so if you leave I export it and hand it over for you to host elsewhere. Your domain, Google Business Profile and email accounts stay in your name throughout. What stops is the ongoing service: the hosting, the monthly work and the connected tools. Nothing is held over you.

Easy. Small content updates are part of your plan. A genuinely new page, section or feature is quoted before any work happens, at a fixed price, so there are no surprises. Bigger changes, a new service line, ecommerce, integrations, are quoted as a separate project. No hidden hourly rates, and no work happens without your written approval of the price.

I shape the page strategy so the site reads clearly and ranks for the right searches, and where you want it, I draft the copy from a short interview with you, you answer a handful of questions, I write the pages, you approve. Either way the words come first and the design is built around them. Generic AI-written waffle does not rank and customers can tell. The copy on your site has to actually sound like you.

Yes. A simple one-page agreement in plain English: the build fee and how it is paid, the monthly plan, the three-month minimum and how cancelling works, and confirmation that the website is yours and your domain, content and accounts stay in your name. No jargon, no nasty clauses.

Yes. Sites are built to WCAG 2.2 AA standards as the baseline, proper colour contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text on images, accessible forms, semantic HTML. This is just decent practice; it should not be a premium-tier extra. If your business has specific accessibility requirements (a public-sector contract, for example), tell me upfront and I will quote any additional work needed to meet them.

Same-day reply during working hours, usually within two hours. Evenings get a reply by 9am the next working day. Weekends are quiet unless a site is genuinely down, uptime alerts hit my phone within five minutes, and emergency fixes happen as soon as I am at a keyboard. The studio runs one project at a time at full attention, so the response time stays honest.

Send a short note via the contact page about your business and the pages you think you need. I come back within one working day with a clear next step and a straight recommendation on which plan fits. No automated sales sequences, no follow-up nonsense, just a real reply from the person who will do the work.